Berkeley police arrest Ricardo Ruiz on March 22, 2025, shortly after he activated his stun gun during an an anti-Trump protest in front of the Tesla dealership on Fourth Street. Credit: Frances Dinkelspiel
A judge has admitted Ricardo Gonzalez Ruiz, whom a Berkeley police officer shot after an armed standoff, to a behavioral health diversion program — and ordered him freed from custody after more than a year in jail.
In a separate criminal trial earlier this year, Ruiz was exonerated of a single misdemeanor assault charge after he drew a stun gun while counterprotesting an anti-Trump protest outside the Fourth Street Tesla dealership in March 2025.
But he still faced charges stemming from the April 2025 incident in which he threatened to shoot police officers, who were investigating a domestic violence report, if they entered his apartment. (His threats were captured on body camera video.)
If Ruiz, 35, who also goes by “Rick Fuze” and posts online as “DJ Occult,” successfully completes the two-year behavioral health diversion program, the single misdemeanor and 10 felony charges against him could be dismissed.
Judge Elisa Della Piana granted entry into the diversion program at a hearing Tuesday. The same day, she ordered Ruiz released on his own recognizance, on the conditions that he break no laws, comply with GPS monitoring and enter a residential behavioral health program, according to court records.
Berkeley Police Department officers first went to Ruiz’s downtown apartment on the morning of April 13, 2025, to investigate a report of a woman inside screaming for help. Footage from the scene captured Ruiz threatening to shoot officers several times and insisting he was being swatted. Police said that an officer shot Ruiz after he came outside with a weapon, not for the first time, and aimed it at officers. (That moment is not clearly shown on the footage police have released; they said at the time the one camera angled directly at Ruiz had been “inadvertently deactivated.”)
Video released by Berkeley police shows the nearly hourlong standoff before an officer shot then-33-year-old Ricardo Ruiz, who had a shotgun and a high-powered air rifle and threatened repeatedly to shoot officers. Credit: Berkeley Police Department
Early in his criminal case, a different judge, Kimberly Colwell, ordered Ruiz to undergo a behavioral health evaluation after he clashed with his first attorney. A court-appointed psychologist, Oakland-based Marlin S. Griffith, determined that Ruiz “was not found to have a mental health diagnosis or condition” and was “mentally competent to stand trial,” according to court records. (Ruiz refused to meet Griffith in person, according to Grifith’s report, which states that he evaluated Ruiz by way of medical records.)
Whatever it was that may have changed between that report, delivered in July 2025, and January of this year, when Ruiz first applied for diversion, is unclear. His petition is not publicly available.
Ruiz was still in custody Wednesday at the Santa Rita Jail in Dublin, where up until Tuesday he would have had to have posted $250,000 bail to walk free pending trial. He spent the first nine days after the standoff in the hospital — he now has a police officer’s bullet lodged in his skull and has lost the use of one eye, according to court records — before he was moved to Santa Rita on April 22, 2025. He has been there ever since.
It is unclear when Ruiz will be able to leave Santa Rita, or where he might live if and when he completes treatment. His public defender did not immediately respond to an inquiry from Berkeleyside.
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